Sigrid Nunez has published seven novels: A Feather on the Breath of God, Naked Sleeper, Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, For Rouenna, The Last of Her Kind,Salvation City, and The Friend. Nunez is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Her work has also appeared in several anthologies, including four Pushcart Prize volumes and four anthologies of Asian-American literature. Among the many journals to which she has contributed are The New York Times, The Paris Review, Harper's, McSweeney's, The Believer, The Threepenny Review, Tin House, and O: The Oprah Magazine.

A Feather on the Breath of God was a finalist for both the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers Award. It also received the Association for Asian American Studies Award for best novel of the year. Mitz, a mock biography of Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s pet monkey, won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Sigrid Nunez has also been the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award, a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a residency from the Lannan Foundation. She was the 2000-2001 Rome Prize Fellow in Literature at the American Academy in Rome. In 2003, she was elected as a Literature Fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In spring 2005, she was the Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

Nunez has taught at Princeton, Amherst, Smith, Columbia, the New School, Boston University, and Brooklyn College, and has been a visiting writer or writer in residence at Washington University, Baruch, Vassar, and the University of California at Irvine, among others. She has also been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and of several other writers' conferences across the country.